SigEp HQ Staff Changes Announced

Doug Scheibe sent this notice out earlier today:

Volunteer Support Team,

Gary Huff will be leaving the HQ staff in September. Gary has been instrumental in establishing key volunteer support tools over the last few years, and he will be missed. He is pursuing opportunities that will allow him to use a broader management and accounting skill set. He will keep us posted on where he will be landing.

The long-term solution regarding HQ personnel assigned to volunteer support will be crafted when the new Executive Director is hired, and the ED has a chance to consult with the National Board and the Volunteer Committee about plans moving forward.

In the interim, Ryan Blanck and Brian Warren will be working with District Governor to recruit, train and support volunteers. You will hear from them at Conclave about goals and action plans. Their tenure on staff and ability to work with volunteers is a good fit.

Thanks for your continued commitment to SigEp volunteers.

Doug

Doug Scheibe, Executive Director
Sigma Phi Epsilon Educational Foundation

Volunteers Wanted

We received this message from Gary Huff. He is reporting on recent training and looking for more volunteers.

Sigma Phi Epsilon eBlast

The Volunteer Committee is pleased to announce a new program geared toward equipping volunteers with the skills necessary to mentor undergraduate chapters to success.

District Governors and an initial cadre of dedicated volunteers have been recruited by their peers to serve as "Volunteer Trainers" (see list below). In addition to their existing SigEp knowledge, these trainers are participating in regularly scheduled distance learning sessions covering all areas of SigEp operations.

The trainers will also participate in Volunteer Trainer weekends. This past weekend, our first group of Trainers gathered at Zollinger house in Richmond, VA to receive training. A second training session will be held in Los Angeles the weekend of September 12.

The volunteer committee aspires to have annual training available for all Alumni and Volunteer Corporations (AVCs). Relying on "Excelsior" data and the results of an AVC assessment the trainer will tailor a specific program for each AVC.

Respecting your time, the training is intended to be both thought-provoking and brief.

If your local AVC has an interest in receiving training, please contact your Regional Director or District Governor. Training will begin in late July.

If you have interest in being a Volunteer Trainer, contact Director of Volunteers Gary Huff. Roles will be filled based on geographical needs.

Volunteer Training Modules

Director of Volunteers Gary Huff has unveiled the first set of online, interactive training modules for SigEp Alumni Volunteers. The first four modules are grouped as "Volunteer Certification". Other modules are available for "RLC" (under Member Development) and "Mentoring Recruitment" (under Recruitment). Gary says that more will be coming as they are developed.

All the training modules are in the "Volunteers" section of the HQ web site, cleverly hidden under the heading "Training Resources."

It will be nice to be a "certified" volunteer for a change, as opposed to being a "certifiable" one.

Always willing to help a brother

It seems as though the much anticipated online volunteer training module has struck a snag. Bro. Huff has put out a cry for help.

Hello & Help Wanted

In working to develop online training modules I have quickly learned why there are experts who develop training materials.

Does anyone know of a good consultant/organization we can work with to aid in the development of our training materials? In addition to our online materials we need to develop materials for classroom training.

Please feel free to contact me at gary.huff@sigep.net As always, we are in a rush!

Thanks,

Gary Huff

Gary, the folks at S&P feel your pain. There is certainly nothing wrong with asking for help. We use help forums at work all the time.

We send this out in hopes that there may be a reader who can offer some assistance. What about it, folks? Any online training experts that can lend a brother a hand? Conclave is fast approaching and it does not look like we will have a "Ready for Prime Time" training experience to show off unless something incredible happens soon.

The product forum is here:
Hello & Help Wanted - Articulate Community Forums

Guest Post - Area Alumni Groups can aid AVCs

(This guest post is from Steve Sauer, PA Tau '02)

How the area alumni group helped my AVC

To explain how the area alumni group helped my AVC is really simple: Through the SigEpFeds, I met a lot of great people, some of whom were starting up an AVC for a local university. They met me, liked me (I think), and recruited me to involve myself in their AVC. I joined and soon started recruiting other people through the same channel, this area alumni group.

We now have 21 people in the AVC after two years, only five of whom are actual graduates of the chapter. Many of the others I attribute to the SigEpFeds, which -- as has been mentioned frequently in the past -- is a largely informal and independent group of individuals who (save for a few Renaissance brothers) share the common background of having participated in SigEp chapters during college, and now just happen to live in the same metropolitan area, whether they grew up around here or not (many of them didn't, myself included), and want to find ways to live out that lifetime responsibility of brotherhood.

How the area alumni group can help your AVC too

Some in an area alumni group say that getting involved in an AVC is the last thing on their minds, or something they want to do eventually but not right now. These are personal choices, like buying a house or getting married or having a baby. There's no reason to be intolerant of those who don't feel ready for that kind of responsibility at any given stage of their lives. For them, the area alumni group offers an array of activities from which they may pick and choose: events focusing on sports, philanthropy, family and networking. In a properly run area alumni group (and the SigEpFeds is striving to be that!), those opportunities abound.

Others want more or different things out of their lives and their lifetime experience of brotherhood, and an area alumni group can work to cater to those who want to participate in a ritual, mentor undergraduate brothers, or offer guidance and leadership as officers of an AVC. The area alumni group itself cannot provide these things, yet it has been a proven tool to link brothers together for a common good. The area alumni group brings together brothers who serve on various AVCs in the area, and these brothers can use the area alumni group to recruit brothers who are either straight out of college, new to the metro area, or have lived under the radar screen for a few years and now want to get involved.

A sad fact about the state of this fraternity is that although we are the largest in manpower nationwide, our 165,000 alumni are, by and large, scarcely more involved than by just sending address changes to SigEp HQ so they can continue to leaf through the pages of the SigEp Journal three times a year. It seems that HQ wants alumni to be active in AVCs so they can aid SigEp in its core mission of building balanced leaders for the future, but what is HQ doing to realize this goal? In my opinion, their efforts have thus far paled in comparison to those of the area alumni group. We have shown success in the DC area of recruiting brothers to become involved in AVCs, and I think it can, and should, be done elsewhere.

I think getting an area alumni group going in each major metropolitan area would help SigEp. Through the establishment of these groups, we would encourage volunteerism to help their keystone undergraduate chapters, thereby building balanced leaders for tomorrow. This is a real need and also an attainable goal. To respond to this need, I propose that HQ create a position for a full-time employee, who preferably bears firsthand experience in the creation and preservation of an area alumni group, to fly from city to city and consult with the alumni who are either founding or continuing existing area alumni groups.

And it just so happens that I will no longer have a job beginning July 1, 2007. Now is that a coincidence or what?

I welcome any and all feedback on this idea: sauerlemon@gmail.com

Steve Sauer
PA Tau '02
President, American University SigEp Alumni & Volunteer Corp., Washington, D.C.
Administrative chair, SigEpFeds area alumni group for metropolitan Washington

CLA Bloomington, Indiana: Welcome to IU

The Bloomington CLA was hosted at the Indiana Memorial Union, Hotel & Conference Center on the campus of Indiana University. Other than a bit of confusion realizing that our hotel was right on campus, this CLA proved to be a nice change of pace. There was more than one comment on the activity in the union and the beautiful architecture. Due to a recent snowfall, earlier that week, of nearly 8” of snow throughout the Indiana, Ohio, and Michigan region, turnout on Friday night was extremely low, at nearly 70 people present for the CLA kickoff. The looming weather and a healthy underestimate of travel time to IU played a distinguishing role. Attendance numbers slowly increased throughout the night and capped off around 200 to 210 attendees. You could audibly hear a collective sigh of relief from the tense faculty as the crowd filled in. Tired and hungry brothers proved tough to motivate on Friday night, and morale was low, but many brothers pushed on through the Chapter Plan / Buchanan cup exercise to close out the sessions on Friday night.

There were a number of notable volunteers present for the weekend. National Board of Directors member, and chair of the National Committee on Volunteers, Phil Cox, was proud to host CLA at his home chapter at IU (Indiana SEC / IN Beta). National Leadership Committee members, Tom Barton and Ron Binder, as well as National Committee on Volunteers member Steve Taylor were in attendance. Other faculty in attendance included Kathy Johnston (Director of Risk Management), Craig Templeton (Executive Director), District Governors Marcus Robinson (Ohio) and Sam Moschelli (Michigan), Dr. Rick St. John (OGH), Dave Bertorello (Past Staff), Shawn Dalgleish, John Milliken, Jason Cherish (HQ Staff), Steven Kolanowski, and rounding it out were the two region’s Regional Directors and a number of soon to be RD’s. Cameos were made by Director of Operations, Chris Minnis, and Director of Volunteers, Gary Huff, as he continued his whirlwind tour of every CLA across the country.

Gary held court Friday night in the Distinguished Alumni Room of the union where he met with about 25 of the volunteers that were present. Phil Cox explained the progress of the National Committee on Volunteers, and Gary spelled out the next steps. Gary showed everyone an example of one on-line training module that highlighted the high points of forming a corporation followed by a tour of www.sigepfoundation.org. (Sign up now for membership if you haven’t already). Gary then explained that there will be 100 trainers across the country that will be making the rounds to every AVC, every other year, to train and update on the local level. One of the next steps is implementing the training programs in a number of varying test markets to gauge its success, and work out the kinks. You can bet that everyone wanted to be in the test market. Gary finished things off with an excited discussion of issues that volunteers brought forth at the conclusion of the meeting, while NCV member Steve Taylor sat inconspicuously in the back taking notes on what the customer had to say. Volunteers ended the discussion leaving with one of their own personal volunteer goals clearly stated as well as gaining another volunteer from a different chapter as a follow-up mentor. As stated in some of our previous CLA reports, the volunteer track was vague. District Governors took some of this time and time during the chapter planning session to meet with their district’s volunteers and help to map out the best path for them at CLA.

The staff did its best to turn the weekend around from a dismal Friday night to an exciting Saturday. It was overheard that there was a combined 300 CLA’s between all the faculty members in attendance. This proved beneficial to a successful Saturday set of sessions. As the day moved forward our brothers proved inquisitive, engaged, and excited. Decorum was business casual until ritual, but many wore suits all day. I guess you can expect that type of thing at a CLA where you have at least 14 Buchanan Cup chapters. Shawn Dalgleish’s Presidents session had great interaction as they produced three full flip chart pages of ideas to leave with. After in-depth conversations about Standards Board and conduct, the Chaplain’s session with Dr. St. John took an innovative approach and combined the afternoon session with the Ritual Team’s practice session, which proved beneficial to all. Chaplain’s also gained some tips and tricks from the unofficial Balanced Man Program Chaplain’s Guide, an adaptation of the 1970’s & 80’s version of the Chaplain’s Guide, that has been circling around some CLA’s. It’s is filled full of underutilized ceremonies, standards board nuances, and ritual insights that can be incorporated with the different phases. A high energy Member Development session led by John Milliken merged with a productive Programming session let by Steve Taylor. The big take away was to kill two birds with one stone and tie your membership development events into your programming and not have separate calendars. A poll was taken of various event ideas each chapter uses, and classified under a number of different categories. Ideas were shared from around the room, with an interesting outcome. Here’s a tally of the ideas in each category:

Civic & Servic (6)
Social (4)
Leadership/professional development (2)
Health & Wellness (2)
Cultural (2)
Academic (1)
Ritual/values (0)

I think this tally in itself speaks volumes about what chapters are taking away as the focus of the fraternity. Is it really becoming SigEp Inc? Have we lost sight of two of the most fundamental components of a fraternity? The fact that this cross section of our chapters tallied a total of ZERO events for Ritual/values utilized above and beyond our typical ritual requirements is eye opening. Even the goal of that which we seek, the graduation diploma, Academics, only had one event worth mentioning. We’re in this together, why does academic success need to be solely on the individual when, as a chapter, we have the means as a group to pull together and take it to a whole new level? It is arguable that if there is a focus on the last two items above, then the other 5 will take care of themselves. I have a great appreciation for all of the above listed areas of focus, and am grateful for the things I’ve learned throughout the Leadership Continuum track. SigEp is leading the charge in the rebirth and validity of Greek life back onto our campuses and it is doing so by becoming a “partner in higher education”. We’re also leading the way in the nationwide fraternity g.p.a., and the Balanced Man Scholarship is our key. We’re finding smarter, and more motivated, active men. Let’s not let the BMS be our only academic event. Utilize the Residential Learning Community program, and if you can’t become one, dissect it and incorporate as many pieces as you can. The other take away from all of this is that the last two items, Ritual and Academics, are just so embedded into a typical chapter’s life, and programmed by HQ and volunteers, that the things they do for those are just ingrained in the chapter psyche and that they just don’t realize they’re doing some cutting edge things. I hope this is the take away, but I fear it is somewhere in between.

The Bloomington CLA finished out on a high note. There was little to no attrition in the final Hot Topic sessions. In fact, they were packed to the gills. The Ritual team from Valparaiso conducted an excellent Epsilon Rite of Passage as they initiated Michael Chown from the Indiana SEC chapter at Indiana University. The Ritual Discussion led by Sam Moschelli turned into an exciting and thought provoking session as our younger members gave their interpretation of the symbolism and meaning found in the keynote of our fraternity located on our chapter charters and membership certificates. Ron Binder and Phil Cox closed out the evening with equally entertaining speeches at dinner. Ron’s “mom” called while he was up at the podium and we all got to listen in on the weekend recap to his mother. “Mom…don’t call it a Frat.” It was entertaining to say the least. Phil left us all with a bit of history about Indiana Memorial Union. It turns out that this location was the first to host a Regional Leadership Academy for SigEp 40 years ago, outside of the ones held in Richmond. Late into the evening, undergraduates were still asking advice and questions to faculty and volunteers, email addresses were traded, and thank you hand shakes were abundant.

My final thoughts on this year’s sessions of CLA, was that the volunteer track was in an off year. With the National Leadership Committee and National Committee on Volunteers still figuring out the track for volunteer training, this year was left in transition, to the displeasure of many. Well trained and cohesive faculty can make or break the experience, and in Bloomington’s case, I think it worked. I suspect that next year there will be a new look to what volunteers will be doing at CLA. Hopefully, this year did not discourage too many alumni.

And that’s your news from the underground. I am the Superintendent.